Satellite 're-purposing' at heart of Louisville company's recent government contract

DARPA Phoenix Program could help tackle massive space junk challenge

By John Aguilar For Hometown Weekly

Posted:
08/09/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT

Each year, more than a dozen satellites go out of service 22,000 miles above our planet, adding to the ever-growing collection of space debris circling the Earth.

When one of those satellites collides with another -- as happened when a dormant Russian satellite smashed into an American one in 2009 -- thousands more pieces of space junk are created, increasing the risk that passing debris could damage operable spacecraft.

Now there's a movement afoot -- involving two Louisville companies and a University of Colorado professor -- to repair and re-purpose old satellites so that fewer of them simply drift off to obsolescence in the celestial junkyard.

The famously secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, recently awarded Louisville-based Altius Space Machines a contract to provide engineering services to DARPA's Phoenix Program, which aims to retrieve valuable components from non-working satellites and reuse them.

That includes antennas and solar arrays, which can cost millions of dollars to launch new into space.

William Bolton, vice president of marketing and sales for the four-person firm, was vigorously circumspect last week about details of the DARPA contract, but he said his 1 1/2-year-old company has made a name for itself in the space-docking field.

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"Our expertise is in space rendezvous and capture," he said. "That's the core of what we're talking about -- the ability to reach out and grab something in space."

The company has been perfecting what it calls its "sticky boom" technology, which uses electrostatic adhesion to grab onto a wide variety of surfaces. Bolton said that technology won't necessarily be a part of its work with DARPA.

DARPA's public affairs office could not be reached for comment last week.

Altius' work with the Phoenix Program will focus on developing a "storable tubular arm" that will extend out to whatever is being worked on and, at the same time, reduce unwanted vibration from that object, be it a satellite or another spacecraft. The company got on DARPA's radar after its involvement in the recently canceled Mars sample return campaign, which was a mission to collect rock and dust samples from the red planet and return them to Earth for analysis.

Bolton said the company is tapping local minds for help. It is subcontracting with CU computer science professor Nikolaus Correll and ROCCOR LLC, also a Louisville engineering outfit.

"It's that whole small innovation thing," Bolton said. "The smaller, lighter and more nimble companies is where Boulder County is going to get its growth from."

Correll said the primary appeal of the Phoenix program to companies that own satellites in space will be financial.

"This is much easier and faster to do than to launch a whole new satellite," said the professor, who is providing modeling for Altius that directly addresses the oscillation challenge in space. "It's about flexibility."

Will Francis, chief engineer with ROCCOR, equated the idea of satellite maintenance to replacing a central processing unit on a computer, while keeping the keyboard, mouse and monitor. His company will be developing the boom and deployer unit for Altius.

"They have things like big antennas or solar arrays that are very expensive," Francis said. "If they can go up and re-purpose these antennas, that can save a lot of money."

And he said there is no doubt that once the system is perfected, it will help reduce the growth of debris in space and, perhaps one day, play a part in reducing the waste field. According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than 10 centimeters in size floating through space. There are half a million more between 1 centimeter and 10 centimeters in size.

"A lot of the things being developed for this mission could be applied to the space junk problem," Francis said.

David Klaus, associate professor with CU's aerospace engineering department, said there is no doubt that, as the commercial space industry continues to grow, services like satellite repair and maintenance will become more commonplace. But companies like Altius will have to earn their place in the marketplace, he cautioned.

"Companies will be asking, 'Does it make more sense to service and repair the satellite or to launch a new one?'" he said.